I have no opinion on whether the rule should exist, but it is something that deserves to be looked at. There are valid reasons for requiring a minimum recent edit count, of course, but perhaps there are better ways to handle it.
The rules did disenfranchise me, for example. It doesn't bother me that I can't vote, but that said, I would've liked to vote if eligible. I am not active on Wikipedia, but I do follow the mailing lists, and have followed the election process. If I really wanted to, I could've racked up 50 edits to get a vote, but that almost seems "dirty", I guess, to make edits just to regain eligibility for the election.
My thought is that there may be other ways to enfranchise users who are clearly community members, but who for some reason or another are inactive on the projects themselves. What those ways are, I don't know.
One thought: If the only, or at least the major reason that we're doing this is to avoid fraud, users with "committed identities" - encrypted messages on their user page as a way to verify their identity in case an account is stolen - could be re-enfranchised on a case-by-case basis if they can provide the passphrase.
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:08 PM, BrianBrian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
The second sentence should read: There is no information in the current heuristic that indicates that editors who are allowed to vote are more or less familiar with the candidates than those who are not.
Who says there needs to be?
The recent edits criteria reduces the incentive to crack or otherwise collect old unused but qualified accounts. For example, I could setup a free watchlist aggregation service and users would give me their passwords. Over time I could obtain many and then wait for accounts to naturally become inactive, then I could vote with them.
It also makes it harder to otherwise obtain votes from accounts whos owners have lost interest in the project and might be willing to part with theirs easily. Recent editing activity also provides more information for analysis in the event that some kind of vote fraud is suspected.
A recent edits criteria is justifiable on this kind of process basis alone.
50 edits can easily be made in a couple of hours, even if you're not making trivial changes. If you're not putting that level of effort it seems somewhat doubtful that you're going to read the >0.5 MBytes of text or so needed to completely and carefully review the provided candidate material from scratch. Like all stereotypes it won't hold true for everyone but if it's true on average then it will produce an average improvement, we just need to be careful not to disenfranchise too many.
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